I'm a professional scavenger making a living selling curbside garbage. This blog details my finds and sales. It also acts as an archive for things beautiful and historic that would otherwise have been destroyed.

Short posts say so much

I’ve been pretty lucky with the rich people garbage lately. I came across a haul of electronic stuff a few weeks ago in Westmount, including: an iPod, iPad (though I can’t get it working thus far), Apple Time Capsule (basically, a router), Roku 3 streaming device, a couple of fitness / GPS watches, and some other doohickeys. This stuff isn’t worth a tonne, but I should be able to net around 150-250$ here overall. And, as I’ve mentioned before this sort of electronic stuff shouldn’t be in the garbage anyways!

I was biking around the Plateau that same day and found some more electronics, most notably this Samsung Galaxy S4 that seems to work totally fine. My guess is that they got a newer one and put this old guy in a drawer, where it sat before being tossed during a move. This cell phone is still pretty useful and is worth around 80-100$.

It’s funny, not long ago the Plateau was actually a low-income neighbourhood, but the gentrification here in the last couple decades has brought a fair number of rich folks to the area. The garbage has gotten a lot better as a result, though I find there is less cool vintage stuff these days.

Last week was one of my best in a while. It started with my finding all those vintage electronics (including the transistor radio) from the last post. Even better though was an epic pile of rich people garbage which provided a wide range of great finds – I’ll detail those in some upcoming posts.

For now I’ll share with you this digital camera (a Nikon Coolpix S9100) which I found in Westmount on Friday. When I first saw it the lens was open like in the picture above. I figured it was busted, but took it because it was relatively modern and I knew it was probably worth something even if just for parts or recycling. However, to my surprise it ended up working fine once charged (luckily, I also found the charger). It’s worth around 50$.

Otherwise, my current plan is to try writing shorter blogs posts more often. It’s a little easier to write shorter posts for a variety of reasons, and I think writing more posts will benefit my blog traffic as well. Anyways, we’ll see how it goes and I hope you like the change!

I am always flabbergasted about what people throw in the garbage! I don’t go through rich neighborhoods garbage, but I find that in the Plateau the most wasteful are Anglo students from other provinces or the US…I am glad your parents are loaded enough to send you to study here but….they should teach you about waste, about drugs and alcool consumption, respect for the property of others, and keeping the noise level down!
Some of you might think that I’ m exagerrating but….every Thursday and Friday night I hear the yelling, swearing and partying and my house has been spray painted on multiple times, not counting the times it has been pissed on…..funny it stops when the students leave……

I’d agree with that. They’re the main reason the McGill move-out trash is so good. There’s also a lot of “nouveau riche” yuppies, particularly in the east. A lot of them I think are better stewards of their junk than other rich folk, but some still toss their old useful junk.

As I have previously mentioned in other posts, I’m originally from Montreal but moved to Ontario a few years ago. We garbage picked last night and we filled the car up right to the top! We picked up not one, not two but three antique chests! All really old and each worth a couple of hundred each! One house, we picked up lots of antiques! It’s mind boggling the stuff that’s in the garbage but we’re quite happy and excited for our future! Were planning trips to Europe and buying a place in the south to escape our cold Canadian winters! Also it’s just a matter of time before my bf quits his job because what he makes in a week, he can make in one day selling our garbage!!

I live in LaSalle and work in the Plateau in a coffee shop.I see twice more garbage output in the Plateau than in LaSalle.How can you be proud to live in a borough with such wasteful residents?I love your blog,but not the mentality of people in your borough.So wasteful in a supposedly progressive borough,Ah.

I don’t think you can generalize so easily. There’s a lot of people here who aren’t wasteful, put out boxes of stuff with “free” written on them, and so on. The population density here is also high (highest in the city other than downtown I expect) so you’re more likely to see big piles of trash.

There are a lot of rich kids some yuppies who just don’t care, but I don’t think it’s fair to say everyone here is wasteful.

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